In 1939 Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden emigrated together to the United States, a time Isherwood describes in spare, luminous prose in this first volume of his collected diaries. Turning to his diary several times a week to record jokes and gossip, observations about his adopted country, and philosophical and mystical insights, he recounts his search for a new life in California; his work as a screenwriter in Hollywood, his pacifism during World War II, and his friendships with such artists and intellectuals as Greta Garbo, Charles Chaplin, Thomas Mann, Charles Laughton, John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, and Aldous Huxley. Born in Cheshire in 1904, Isherwood first left England to live openly as a gay man in the demimonde of Weimar Berlin, where he was inspired to create stories that would later become wildly popular in the Broadway play I Am a Camera and the musical Cabaret.